Abstract
A FREQUENT correspondent to NATURE about a generation ago was Mr. Alexander Baird MacDowall, who completed his ninety-third year on December 18. Mr. MacDowall was particularly interested in terrestrial and solar meteorology and the relationships between them, and most of his communications to these columns and to the Royal Meteorological Society dealt with this subject. The methods used by him, and some of the results, are typically illustrated in a small book published in 1895 with the title “Weather and Disease: a Curve History of their Variations”. In this volume Mr. MacDowall showed, by means of graphs, the variations which certain elements of the weather and the mortality from certain diseases had undergone in the course of years. The mode of representation adopted by him was that commonly used at the time to illustrate the relation between two variables, the curves being subjected to a process of smoothing so as to record the averages of five or ten consecutive values.
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Mr. A. B. MacDowall. Nature 138, 1045 (1936). https://doi.org/10.1038/1381045b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1381045b0